Enter the halls of power and make your mark on history.
Ship of Heroes is an exciting new Sci-Fi MMORPG with beautiful vistas and thoughtful art direction. In today's video, you'll see several of our favorite in-game scenes that highlight the varied visuals of SoH. All scenes are exactly the way players would see them except for the minimized UI. In our video, there are no cinematic cutscenes slowly rendered at movie quality to hide how the game really looks.
Meet interesting aliens - and blow up their warships from the inside.
There are not too many PC MMORPGs where you can join a 50-man raid and rain fire, throw lightning, or blast beams of dark magic on a giant boss together. Or even hold a costume contest with 50 unique costumes in a line. Of those, fewer still can compare to SoH visually. So, in our market niche, we are one of the best looking games available. And our top-notch art direction is a big part of the reason why.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Art Direction Done Right
Art direction is about making countless small, aesthetic choices that all need to fit the themes, mood, tone, mechanics, platform, and audience of a game. You want enough consistency that every location, enemy, and UI menu is part of a cohesive whole, and enough change to keep your players entertained. Ship of Heroes delivers on both fronts.
Even old maintenance areas get auto-cleaned in the far future.
For example, the FHS Justice is over 200 years old. It's been expanded and rebuilt many times, so certain low-priority areas look much older and more worn than the gleaming streets. But both were clearly made by the same species. Alien ships look like they were manufactured by different species, with different thought processes. And cleaning nanites are commonplace, especially in spaceships, so you won't find a lot of trash outside of recent combat zones. In contrast, the temporary mining colony on New California has a functional look and is not as well maintained. Only the teleport pad that the whole colony relies on is more sophisticated.
The functional look of the New California mining colony town
The sophisticated New California teleport pad
The future on display in SoH is a bright one, full of advancements and wonder. Far away from the influence of Earth, the massive city-ship F.H.S. Justice is clean, beautiful, and prosperous. But a bright light casts the darkest shadows; the ship is also beset by threats, internal and external. As a hero, you'll find yourself in conflict with many groups, for many reasons. Murderous space aliens. Cunning cyborg kidnappers. Secret societies. Gruff mercenaries willing to do dirty deeds for the right price. And the list goes on... The beautiful environments support this story dynamic, showing you what most heroes are fighting for.
Sometimes, you just have to fight bad guys inside a giant plasma cannon, while it's firing.
SoH can be played on a wide variety of computers. You can focus on FPS or maximize the graphical fidelity of the immersive FX as you prefer. Players get both text and voiced NPC interactions, and can set their own balance for voice volume, music, and sound FX separately.
The defaults work well, but you have a lot of room to make changes, too.
But setting the defaults well is also part of good art direction. For example, shadows tend to strain your PC much more than graphical upgrades like antialiasing, or even high-res textures, especially when there are 100 other characters nearby. So, we use selective shadows and strong antialiasing to enable big raids that still look good.
Heroes and skyscrapers alike cast shadows.
Ship of Heroes is easy to learn but challenging to master. Even the UI gives you much more control and many more customization options than usual. You'll end up combining many combat powers, utility powers like flight, consumable items, info about your teammates, positioning, and more. In a way, it's almost like a grand strategy game. Our professional art direction keeps the screen looking nice even on the hardest difficulties, where you'll need to track a lot of information to win.
All of those pretty icons at the bottom are useful.
If you've ever wanted to explore a completely new and innovative MMORPG, discover secrets no one else has found yet, and be able to say: “I was playing the day the game launched,” be sure to wishlist Ship of Heroes on Steam.
Technical Notes
1. SoH has made a commitment to transparency, so we do not publish slick marketing videos with impossible graphics and pretend that they're gameplay. We generally use the current Steam version of the game to produce our cutscenes. And we're proud of how SoH gameplay footage compares to similar in-game videos of other MMORPGs. Even some with much larger budgets don't match up.
2. Like all smart dev teams working in the Unreal Engine, we use some of the best purchased assets along with our many custom-built ones. However, we almost never use characters, props, buildings or other items right out of the box. They usually aren’t consistent with our art direction – or our polygon standards. Usually, we have to upgrade and alter them substantially before putting them into the game.
3. Minimizing the UI is not just a dev privilege. Players can minimize the UI by pressing ALT + U or select which UI element you see. Fighting with the UI hidden is harder, though.
4. Like most MMORPGs, SoH will look much prettier depending on your computer's CPU, GPU, internet connection speed, and what other programs it's trying to run, plus how busy the servers are. We provide players with significant controls to offset these impacts to some degree.